Myths and Legends of Babylonia and Assyria

Page: 27

Origin of Cuneiform

This peculiar system of writing originated in Babylonia, its inventors
being the Sumerian or non-Semitic people who inhabited that country
before its settlement by the Babylonians. It was developed from
picture-writing, and indeed some of the more highly significant of
the pictorial signs can still be faintly traced in their cuneiform
equivalents. This early picture-writing was inscribed on stone, but
eventually soft clay was adopted as a medium for the script, and it
was found that straight lines impressed upon this medium tended to the
shape of a wedge. The pictures therefore lost their original character
and came to be mere conventional groups of wedges. The plural was
represented by doubling the sign, and a term might be intensified
by the addition of a certain stroke: thus the sign for 'house,' if
four small strokes were added to it, would mean 'great house,' and so
forth. The script was badly suited to the Assyrian language, as it
had not been originally designed for a Semitic tongue. It consists
of simple syllables made up of a vowel by itself or a vowel and a
consonant, ideograms or signs which express an entire word, and closed
syllables such as bit or bal. Again, many of the signs have[Pg 67] more
than one syllabic value, and they may be used as ideograms as well as
phonetically. As in the Egyptian script, determinatives are employed to
indicate the class to which the word belongs: thus, a certain sign is
placed before the names of persons, another before territorial names,
and a third before the names of gods and sacred beings. The date of the
epoch in which this writing first began to be used was probably about
4500 B.C. and it persisted until the first century B.C. The Assyrians
employed it from about 1500 B.C. until about the beginning of the sixth
century B.C. This ancient form of writing was thus used first by the
Sumerians, then by their Babylonian and Assyrian conquerors, then by
those Persians who finally overthrew the Babylonian and Assyrian empire.

The Sacred Literature of Babylonia

The literature which this peculiar and individual script has brought
down to us is chiefly religious, magical, epical, and legendary. The
last three categories are dealt with elsewhere, so that it only falls
here to consider the first class, the religious writings. These are
usually composed in Semitic Babylonian without any trace of Akkadian
influence, and it cannot be said that they display any especial natural
eloquence or literary distinction. In an address to the sun-god, which
begins nobly enough with a high apostrophe to the golden luminary of
day, we find ourselves descending gradually into an atmosphere of
almost ludicrous dullness. The person praying desires the sun-god to
free him from the commonplace cares of family and domestic annoyances,
enumerating spells against all of his relatives in order that they
may not place their 'ban' upon[Pg 68] him. In another, written in Akkadian,
the penitent addresses Gubarra, Merodach, and other gods, desiring
that they direct their eyes kindly upon him and that his supplication
may reach them. Strangely enough the prayer fervently pleads that its
utterance may do good to the gods! that it may let their hearts rest,
their livers be quieted, and gladden them like a father and a mother
who have begotten children. This is not so strange when we come to
consider the nature of these hymns, many of which come perilously near
the border-line of pure magic—that is, they closely resemble spells.
We find, too, that those which invoke the older deities such as Gibi
the fire-god, are more magical in their trend than those addressed to
the later gods when a higher sense of religious feeling had probably
been evolved. Indeed, it does not seem too much to say that some of
these early hymns may have served the purpose of later incantations.
Most of those 'magical' hymns appear to have emanated from that
extremely ancient seat of religion, Eridu, and are probably relics of
the time when as yet magic and religion were scarcely differentiated in
the priestly or the popular mind.